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Iraqi Government Corruption Scandal - Reportedly the World's Worst

Huffington Post has done some great investigative journalism, (good to see some organizations still doing some) in conjunction with The Age and Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Michael Bachelard and Daniel Quinlan, on a huge Iraqi corruption scandal involving the Iraqi government. Heck, even the Ayatollah Sistani has issued a fatwa against the Iraqi government, vis-a-vi this corruption.

It's a great read:

There was little about the man walking through Heathrow Airport to show he held secrets that could bring down some of the most powerful men in Iraq.Moustached, olive skinned, hair receding, eyes sharp. His name was Basil Al Jarah. His British passport showed he lived in Hull, an unremarkable town in the north of England, but it bore the stamps of a frequent traveller: London, Baghdad, Basra, Amman, Paris, Istanbul, Kuwait.Basil Al Jarah was an oil industry fixer. But had authorities known his true business, they might have taken a far keener interest in the man waiting for a plane to Amman in 2011. Because by that stage, Al Jarah and his employer, a Monaco-based company called Unaoil, had cultivated an astonishing web of influence in the upper echelons of Iraqi power – all based on the simple expedient of bribing the right man at the right time.As tens of thousands of secret emails reveal, Al Jarah and Unaoil were at the heart of a global bribery operation funded, sometimes wittingly, by dozens of US, British, European and Australian multinationals. These firms paid huge sums to Unaoil. In return, Unaoil used its friends in high places to win billions of dollars worth of government contracts.

A Best Buy Geek Squad Volkswagen New Beetle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I had previously covered this here in a post earlier this past January. Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced that they are suing the FBI for the list of informants they used at Geek Squad.
The EFF also posted to their members blog the reasons why they wish to uncover these informants.

The reasoning from EFF's post:

"Sending your computer to Best Buy for repairs shouldn’t require you to surrender your Fourth Amendment rights. But that’s apparently what’s been happening when customers send their computers to a Geek Squad repair facility in Kentucky.

We think the FBI’s use of Best Buy Geek Squad employees to search people’s computers without a warrant threatens to circumvent people’s constitutional rights. That’s why we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit today against the FBI seeking records about the extent to which it directs and trains Best Buy employees to conduct warr…

From the wonderful conference 'IdeaCity' comes this presentation from Dr Shaf Keshavjee and the great work he and his team perform at Toronto General Hospital. The world's first successful lung transplant was done here in the early 80s. Enjoy.